The Ones That Are There
by iccypenguin
Summary: The shortest horror story ever known has just been made a little bit longer...
1. Chapter 1

_Do you guys know what the shortest horror story ever written in history was? It's known by many names and I'm not sure which title it goes by, but it was written by Fredric Brown. It goes something like this..._

_A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the world; every other living thing is dead._

_The door bell rings._

_Our newest english assignment is to continue the story with a limit of no more than 4 pages (I bent the rules a bit. After all, rules are made to be broken!)_

_This is my version. Enjoy._

* * *

A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world; every other living thing is dead.

The doorbell rings.

She leaned against the aged table with her wrinkled hands, needing as much support as she can get to do as simple of a task as standing up. She shuffled her worn body across the floor, her feet dragging across the tattered carpet, now a fading gray. Her body moved automatically, neither with nor against her will simply because she no longer has a will for anything.

She froze, her elderly hands reaching for the doorknob, her fingertips brushing against the brass handle. Awareness crept in and she took a moment to recompose herself. She decided it was nothing. It must be a mistake. Perhaps she had heard wrong. Perhaps she was getting too old and hearing things. Perhaps the doorbell was broken. Perhaps one of the intricate wires woven beneath the plastic button grew rusted with time. After all, nothing can last forever.

Mistaken with age or broken with time, it does not matter, she thought but she could conjure no explanation as she suddenly turn the lock on the door. She does not know what made her do it. She can't even recall seeing a lock here before. Or maybe she had overlooked, like how she had neglected the time that had passed. There is no point in keeping the details with no one to share. It doesn't make sense. But then again, nothing ever makes sense nowadays.

She rocked back and forth, letting the cries of the chair attempt to fill the empty silence. She tried to remember the last time she had imagined something of the sort.

She never had an imaginary friend, but she did have an unseen friend who followed her around. He was her protector, her guardian. He might have been an angel; he might have been a ghost. She really didn't care. He didn't talk to her; he just was there, watching her watching him. She was aware of others out there watching too, but they weren't there for her. They were there for others.

Eventually, her friend talked-in her head, in a conversation as clear yet opaque as the doorbell she thought she'd just heard. She wasn't going insane, she wasn't on drugs. She was simply learning about life.

She had been in the hospital with severe bronchitis when she was seven and was in an oxygen tent and supposedly she had almost died. She can't remember much about it, just the foggy part of playing with the zipper on the oxygen tent. She was alone and bored. Then she had an unexpected visitor at the hospital.

He was a boy. She couldn't tell what he looked like or even what he was wearing because he hid behind the tent in a secluded corner apart from her vision. When you are a kid, you can't figure out what is make-believe and what is real; it all kind of melts together.

He had put a coin through the opened zipper of the oxygen tent.

The coin was rusted; aged and ancient. She ran her thumb on the surface, her fingers tingling at the indents marked throughout the coin. She can't remember what the carvings were a picture of-just the fact that both faces are of different pictures; one with the markings as indents while the other was popped out of the surface. She would close the zipper and laugh and then open up the zipper and put it in his palm to try to guess which side of the coin she'd get.

After a while, a nurse came in and asked why she was laughing and talking to herself. She thought she was a jerk. She wasn't talking to herself.

He would visit in the early evening and stay and leave in his own will. She didn't know who he was but he stayed every day to entertain her until she was discharged. She remembered him standing behind the doctor and nurse when she was first admitted. She thought it was odd that they ignored him.


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

He showed up again on the dock when she was a teenager and had almost drowned at the beach. She was trying to learn how to swim with her father and brother and she was standing on the dock yelling if she could jump in. Her dad said, "Go ahead!" but he was kidding. She jumped in anyway and immediately she was way over her head and sank to the bottom like a rock. She had her eyes opened and she held her last breath. There was a fish on the bottom and a horseshoe crab lumbering along. It was so peaceful. She stifled the urge to breathe and that was when she saw her friend again.

He yanked her arm towards the shallower area. It seemed like a mile away. She was starting to black out, but not before she saw something glistening in the sunlight; a gold coin, she had concluded when she looked back at this memory. She remembered her father pulling her out of the water, yelling at her and looking more terrified than angered. What she doesn't recall was the boy and what he looked like. The waters were too murky for her to remember clearly.

* * *

She didn't see her friend again until years later. She found that this little friend of hers never aged as she did; he was there looking very real and not nebulous or ethereal at all like a spirit would, nor did he have the wings of an angel.

She was in a car accident with her family when they decided to go on a road trip before she's sent away for college. She had an operation on her left leg and her brother had suffered shoulder muscle damage and her father had been knocked out by the impact and had stitches in his head. They had all survived but she had post traumatic stress for the years following and she thinks she still have some repressed fears somewhere.

Her friend would sit and talk to her when she slept and dreamed. He never spoke to her; not with words, not even with sounds, but more with movements and emotions. He had given her the coin again and as she traced her fingertips against the gold, he told her not to fret and not to worry. Fear was for him to take away.

She went to nursing school when she was seventeen. She wanted get away from her parents. She wanted to be on her own. It was fun for a couple of months but then it got very lonely. Everyone went home on the weekends and she was stuck in the dorm.

At night the dorm wasn't quiet. There were knocks, banging sounds, and footsteps down the hall or above her on the upper floors. They were so noisy, it was impossible to think straight. They were pretty wild. She thought maybe the dorm had some hauntings going on or maybe the 'unseen' visitors are actually her dorm mates' spiritual guides, trying to get their attention but are being ignored out of ignorance or fear or both.

She was doing horrible in class, failing tests and exams, and eventually she was told she should just go home. She'd never be a nurse. She cried her eyes out and called her parents in shame and they said it was okay, that she can go to the community college and learn something near home but no matter what they said, it still didn't change a thing.

Independence was what she had aimed for and failure was what she had found.

* * *

Her friend sat in the shadows of her bedroom and told her not to worry. He said that for every disappointment a person goes through, it becomes a way of making them stronger and better as a person. She told him she wanted to be well-known and respected and adored. He laughed and said she should get out the make-believe world; they all wanted that.

She listened to him, all the while wondering when he will hand her the coin. It was expected that whenever they meet she would get to see the coin. It was a childish thing-at least, that's what she'd thought-to find so much entertainment in a simple object, but at twenty years old, she found herself waiting patiently on her bedside window. She had always been curious as to what the coin really looked like in the bright sunlight. She wondered about the pictures engraved on the surface. For some reason, she remembered the shape of a skull.

She drifted to sleep, hearing his words weave a lullaby in the night air. When she sleeps, nothing can wake her and when she opened her eyes again, he was already gone.

That was the last time she saw him.


End file.
